Days 26 and 27 – Tuscania Do We Really Have to Go Home?

The last couple of days have been a paradigm of summer laziness. We’ve done nothing but hang out at the pool, eat, drink, read and for the girls, paint in the garden. This is it, our final week in Italy and so we seem to living it as low key as possible. Plus, the girls have basically boycotted getting into the car. They are so over any sort of excursions and sightseeing, though we may have to rouse them a couple more times just to feel like we’ve covered every inch of this slice of Italy.

None of us really want to leave. The girls have gone through bouts of homesickness, but both of them have said they would rather stay here. Even the lure of camp isn’t enough to pull them out of their Italian daze. And why should it? Camp right now is the great unknown; they don’t know their bus color, their fellow campers or if they will pass the all important deep water test. I can see the anxiety starting to build. Hopefully they will be so jetlagged when we get back to New York that sleep won’t be a huge issue the night before the first day of camp. (wishful thinking I’m sure.)

There is always a certain dread when returning from vacation back to your every day life, but this time its exacerbated by the fact that we know we’ll never have this chunk of time again when all four of us can take a full month off and travel as a family. I can see the appeal of being teachers or professors and having summers off. That is definitely a priceless perk of the job. My ultimate dream would be to spend an entire year traveling around the world as a family. But, how to make that happen financially seems nearly impossible. This trip has made me realize that the ideal age would probably be when the girls are around 10 or 11. Old enough to appreciate it and yet young enough to still tolerate your parents and be able to keep up with schoolwork while abroad. I guess that gives me 3 or 4 years to figure it out.

In the meantime we are trying to soak up every last bit of clean Italian sunshine, eat all the fresh pasta, tomatoes and gelato we can, and take advantage of the few days we have left in Tuscania. And since the airlines make it practically impossible to bring back wine and olive oil we’ll have to try and bring home the spirit of being here instead. (ask me in November if we succeeded – I’m guessing not.)

We’re also eating out at every restaurant that we haven’t yet hit. Who wants to be cooking at home when there is so much more pizza, pasta and panna cotta to be sampled just outside our door? I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to slip Annie’s mac ‘n cheese or frozen pizza to the girls again.

(these pictures aren’t great because they were taken with a blackberry at night, but you get the finger-lickin- idea!)